Christie Blatchford is surely right to say the Indian Act must go; the Act is a relic of a Canada long gone. But merely repealing the Indian Act is not an option.
Canada's aboriginal population is young, growing and needs to be made a truly equal part of the fabric of the nation. Just as Canada has developed ways to preserve and promote both French and English culture so too must aboriginal traditions and languages be given space to develop and grow.
Canada is Canada in part because of our aboriginal heritage. Allowing that heritage room to grow and prosper will not be easy. Perhaps Stephen Harper's becoming a chief of the Blood Tribe in southern Alberta (wrongly seen by some as a publicity stunt) is a first step towards a new rapprochement?
in Hobbema, Alta.
In this place, with its overflowing garbage bins and ramshackle homes and as many people as rez dogs wandering the rutted roads and with approximately the same wary exhaustion, it is hard to argue with Shawn Atleo that Ottawa has been anything but disastrous for Aboriginal Canadians.
From the Assembly of First Nations meeting in Moncton on the other side of the country, in the wake of the slaying of a dear little boy as he lay sleeping in his bed at the Samson Cree Nation here, the national AFN chief Tuesday called for the abolition of the old Indian Act and the vast Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANC) bureaucracy which in its awful language “supports” First Nations.
AANC is the new name for Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada, or INAC.
The change, official just last month, is the institutional equivalent of what well-meaning volunteers did on the Samson reserve not long ago by painting over the worst graffiti-marred homes with bright, cheerful First Nations drawings.
That bureaucracy is still enormous, impenetrable, growing; those homes on the Samson town site are still sad shacks behind their paint: What they were all doing, as the now-famous saying goes, was putting lipstick on a pig
Mr. Atleo wasn’t specific about what a new relationship between Ottawa and First Nations might look like, but what he was sure and blunt and correct about was that the current system is an unmitigated failure.
3 comments:
The cultures cannot survive. The history of humanity is filled with lost civilizations, languages, traditions and customs.
What makes you think that this can or will end differently?
I am not saying it is good or right but only that I believe it to be fact.
Look at Nunavut -- Inuit culture and language is alive and thriving. One can argue culture isn't worth much but if so Canada itself is not worth preserving -- after all, French in North America? An English speaking nation next to the United States?
I didn't say that the cultures were not worth much only that they won't survive.To some extent some of the cultures have already died.
Tens of billions have been spent only to deliver squalor and discontent.(mostly anyways).
The casinos and discount liquor joints that are propping up all over North America are hardly a culture worth preserving nor is it part of the traditional culture that people associate with first nations.
I'll take your word for it that the Inuit in the north are thriving. However, for every success story there are horror stories of children sniffing gasoline and drug addicted young women being found murdered.
Suggesting now that after 200+ years of corruption and waste that this time we'll get it right is naive.
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